Nick Clegg argues policy and technological gap may be minimised

The president of global affairs at Meta, Nick Clegg, said on Wednesday that the gap between policymaking and technology can be minimised and called on the US, Europe, and India to come to consensus on fundamental principles of tech-related lawmaking as lawmakers try to catch up with rapidly evolving technologies and their impact on society.

Although politics cannot advance as quickly as technology, the gap can be closed. 13 years have passed since the Facebook “Like” button was created, and here we are today discussing social media regulation. The 13 years get filled with people screaming at us to come up with solutions that we are unable to come up with, which is actually bad for us as a firm, Clegg said at an Idea Exchange event of The Indian Express.

Additionally, Clegg asked lawmakers everywhere to consider metaverse rules, claiming that a delay would be detrimental to companies like Meta.

When it comes to regulating the metaverse while establishing guidelines for data portability, interoperability, child safety, age-gating, etc., he urged decision-makers not to follow a similar trend.

“Handpicking different parties to support at different times would be absurd, both in theory and in fact. Governments frequently come and go. The Left accuses us frequently of favouring the Right and vice versa. Take the US as an example; half the population believes that we suppress their political ideas, while the other half believes that we censor too much. What justifiable reason could there be for us to change our serious position on political neutrality when the political climate is constantly shifting? he asked.

When asked if political considerations are taken into account by Meta when making content moderation decisions in countries like India, Clegg responded that given that “governments come and go all the time,” it is not in the company’s best interests to favour one political party or ideology over another.

Clegg urged for a harmonisation of the fundamental principles guiding policymaking and noted that the US, EU, and India are currently the three leading regulatory forces globally on technology concerns. “Today, the EU, the USA, and India are the main regulatory forces. The openness of the internet for future generations will be preserved if they can agree on some fundamental bedrock concepts, he said, even while they cannot agree on the specifics of legislation.

He remarked the proposed law “is a model of clarity and consistency” in his remarks regarding India’s recently published Digital Personal Data Protection Bill, 2022. The general structure of the draught Bill is cleaner, leaner, and far more coherent than a lot of legislation I see throughout the world, he claimed, albeit many details have been left for the implementation phase.

According to Clegg, many different stakeholders will work together to create not only Meta but the entire metaverse, and the company’s strategy will be iterative within that framework. I’m hoping that Indians will soon be able to access our Horizon experiences on their phones and PCs. The types of virtual products we are developing that will be usable on a variety of devices are not the final product, but rather an extremely significant iterative step in gauging how users react to those experiences, the executive said. BollyInside